Last night The Epoch Times sent out THIS article from last September headed “China Is Using Fentanyl as ‘Chemical Warfare,’ Experts Say.”
The long piece begins, “Behind the deadly opioid epidemic ravaging communities across the United States lies a carefully planned strategy by a hostile foreign power that experts describe as a ‘form of chemical warfare.’”
It rang a bell with Douglas Valentine.
“Yes, blaming China for drugs is a longstanding psywar policy.”
Several pages from his authoritative 2004 book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, follow.
— Mark Channing Miller
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(From pages 68 to 70)
These developments marked an important turning point in [Federal Bureau of Narcotics] history, for by suppressing [agent Ralph H.] Oyler’s reports about Communist Chinese anti-narcotics activities, while publicizing all allegations of Communist wrongdoing, [Commissioner Harry J.] Anslinger made the FBN an integral part of America’s propaganda machine. And by swearing his undying loyalty to China Lobby Senators Pat McCarran (Chairman of the Judiciary Committee), James O. Eastland (Chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee) and Richard B. Russell (Chairman of the Appropriations Committee), Anslinger assured the FBN’s bureaucratic survival at a time when the Truman Administration was talking about transferring the Bureau to the Justice Department.
Anslinger’s love for the China Lobby had to do with self-preservation too. Having witnessed the Lobby’s destruction of John S. Service, a Foreign Service officer who had reported on the Kuomintang’s narcotics dealings, the Commissioner was keenly aware of its power over the fate of government employees. For this reason the Service case is worth reviewing.
While serving as General Joseph Stillwell’s liaison to the Communist Chinese in 1944, Service reported that the whole lifestyle of Kunming, the city where the Flying Tigers and OSS were headquartered, “was tied to opium smoking.” He said the Nationalists were “decadent,” totally dependent on opium, and “incapable of solving China’s problems.”
Service was a senior officer with years of experience in China, and his reports contributed to the Truman Administration’s decision not to come to Chiang Kai-shek’s rescue. In retaliation, General Tai Li’s agents in America accused Service of leaking the Kuomintang’s battle plans to a Leftist newsletter. He was arrested in June 1945 and, though cleared of any wrongdoing, the China Lobby persisted in attacking his character for the next six years. He was subjected to eight loyalty hearings, and dismissed from the State Department in 1951.
Services’ persecution was fair warning that anyone linking the Nationalist Chinese to drug smuggling would, at a minimum, be branded a communist sympathizer and have his reputation ruined. It was a warning Anslinger heeded. …
Helping to manage public perceptions in this regard was former Ambassador to France and Russia, William C. Bullitt. One of several diplomats linked to smuggling in the post-war era, Bullitt went to the Far East as a reporter for China Lobby activist Henry Luce. A feature article Bullitt subsequently wrote for Life Magazine slammed Truman for not supporting the Nationalists, and provided the Republicans with the enduring “Truman lost China” theme with which to bash the Democrats. Bullitt, meanwhile, was dining regularly in Paris with Vietnam’s playboy Emperor Bao Dai, an opium smoker who relied on opium profits to finance his decadent regime.
In secret the government rationalized its protection of the drug smuggling Nationalists by insisting that any attendant health problems were confined to the Far East. But by mid-1947, Kuomintang narcotics were reaching America through Mexico. The Mafia was involved, as was Bugsy Siegel through his ill-fated love affair with curvaceous mob courier and courtesan, Virginia Hill. Described by Anslinger as a “prominent narcotics figure,” Siegel in 1947 was the subject of an FBN conspiracy case that included all the usual suspects: Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Chicago’s Charlie Fischetti.
The Siegel drug conspiracy began in 1939 when, at Meyer Lansky’s request, Virginia Hill moved to Mexico and seduced a number of Mexico’s “top politicians, army officers, diplomats, and police officials.” Hill soon came to own a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo, and started making frequent trips to Mexico City with Dr. Margaret Chung, an honorary member of the Hip Sing T’ong, and the attending physician to the Flying Tigers – the private airline formed under China Lobby luminary General Claire Chennault to fly supplies to the Nationalists in Kunming – the city John Service described as infused with OSS agents and opium. More to the point, as investigative journalist Ed Reid reported in The Mistress and the Mafia, the FBN knew that Dr. Chung was “in the narcotic traffic in San Francisco.”
Chung took large cash payments from Siegel and Hill, and delivered packages to Hill in New Orleans, Las Vegas, New York and Chicago. These deals involved Kuomintang narcotics, and yet, despite the fact that the FBN agents “kept her under constant surveillance for years,” they “were never able to make an arrest.”
Why not? Because she was protected, of course. Admiral Chester A. Nimitz was just one of her many influential friends in Washington. And unlike Bugsy Siegel, she wasn’t making waves, although where, exactly, Siegel went wrong is open to debate. By most accounts he was murdered by the Mafia for squandering mob money on the Flamingo Hotel. But FBN agent Joe Bell – George White’s replacement as district supervisor in Chicago – advanced a more plausible theory: that Siegel’s murder, “paved the way to complete control of illegal narcotics distribution in California by the Mafia.” …
(From pages 76 and 77)
The People’s Republic of China vs. Taiwan
US government support for drug smugglers as a function of national security moved with the Kuomintang to Taiwan in October 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established. At American insistence, the Nationalists were recognized by the UN as China’s legitimate government. Meanwhile, under the direction of the CIA, drug smuggler General Li Mi and the Nationalists’ 93rd Division crossed into Burma and, with the assistance of CIA assets in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, began launching covert paramilitary operations against Mainland China. To bolster the CIA’s covert actions, China Lobby Senator Pat McCarran in February 1949 requested $1.5 million in aide to the Kuomintang, and in April Senator Knowland began attacking KMT critics in the State Department. Determined to prevent the UN from admitting the PRC, the China Lobby launched a massive propaganda campaign based largely on Anslinger’s allegations that the PRC was the source of all the illicit dope that reached Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong – despite the 23 July 1949 seizure at Hong Kong’s Kaituk airfield of 22 pounds of heroin that had emanated from a CIA-supplied, Kuomintang outpost in Kunming.